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Thursday, 18 February 2016

Panthers & The Museum Of Fire - Jen Craig - 2016 Stella Prize

Partly because I think, as an Australian, I should read more Australian literature and partly because of the gender bias in publishing and reviewing, I thought I would look at a few (I
may even get through the whole longlist) books longlisted for the 2016 Stella Prize.

The Stella Prize is a major literary award celebrating Australian women’s
writing, and championing diversity and cultural change.

The prize is named after one of Australia’s iconic
female authors, Stella Maria Sarah ‘Miles’ Franklin, and was awarded for the
first time in 2013. Both nonfiction and fiction books by Australian women are
eligible for entry.

The Stella Prize seeks to:

·recognise and celebrate
Australian women writers’ contribution to literature

·bring more readers to books
by women and thus increase their sales

·provide role models for
schoolgirls and emerging female writers

·reward one writer with a
$50,000 prize – money that buys a writer some measure of financial independence
and thus time, that most undervalued yet necessary commodity for women, to
focus on their writing

“Panthers and the
Museum of Fire” is a short novel that suits my eclectic tastes. It starts with
our narrator (Jen Craig) walking to a café, holding a manuscript, it was
written by her only childhood friend who has recently died, the manuscript is
titled “Panthers and the Museum of Fire”, so named after a brown and white “tourist”
sign on the main highway to the Blue Mountains, directing you to the Penrith Panthers
Leagues Club (a Rugby League Team) or the Museum of Fire also in Penrith. The reading
of this manuscript has impacted our protagonist greatly, as a reader we are intrigued
as to the contents;

You have to imagine a book, I should have told my friend – a book but
not a book – the fact that it was a manuscript made a difference. The whole
time you were reading this manuscript that was not yet a book, you would have
found the experience of reading just an experience of waiting; the whole time that
you were reading, you were also waiting. As soon as you started the manuscript,
you would find yourself waiting for it to start, to really start. You kept flicking pages and reading and flicking –
not skipping any pages, but flicking them all the same – and the whole time you
were reading you were waiting for the story in the manuscript to start for real. This feeling, you have
to realise, kept up the whole time. There was never a moment when you thought
you had started on the section of the manuscript where the real part began. At
first you would have been flicking the pages and thinking, well she could have
cut these paragraphs and all of these pages here, cut all of it so far, and yet
this feeling of needed to cut most of what you were reading persisted until the
end. In fact, the whole of the reading seemed to be just the prelude to a
reading; it pulled you along from one sentence to the next, one paragraph to
the next, and you held on for some reason, never doubting for an instant that
the real part of the story would be about to begin; and even when you knew,
later on, when it was evidently too late, that
there was no real part – when you watched yourself holding on to your role
in the reading like an idiotic fool, holding on for the real part to begin when
all the time there was never a real part, all the time there was nothing but
the reading of the manuscript one word after another, the words being
everything, the storyline nothing – you continued to read, I should have told
Raf last night, although I was still jet-lagged, if I could call it that, from
the experience of reading and writing. It was the most idiotic thing, but you
continued to read.

On pages 5-6 of this
book you have been warned, this is a book about a book (“not yet a book”) that
has no plot, does our book have a plot? It is a book about reading, about
writing, a book that is written in long meandering paragraphs, rantings, random
thoughts interrupting the train of thought or “plot”, that takes place in the
time it takes to walk from home to a café, although the meanderings and
thoughts covers years of our narrator’s existence.

This is a unique
voice, an infuriating, annoying voice, a young self-centred voice that never
shuts up, but that doesn’t mean it is a voice that shouldn’t be heard. The
basic premise of the book and the reflections upon a past friendship of
somebody who has recently died, as well as the consistent referral to her only
true friend, Raf, who she had around for dinner the previous evening, all
radiate from this voice, a voice that looks inward at all times, but it is also
a voice of somebody who recognises here failings, “it was not so much a friendship
as an exploitation”.

We have youthful
anorexia, a religious interlude, and all the insecurities and self-doubt of a
young person moving towards adulthood. The observations of writing, reading,
publishing are scathing in their revelation of best sellers, of struggling to
write…

Every time I pass a bookshop that has the latest releases and the latest
promotions of fiction in the window, I am never curious about anything that
lies inside the pages whose thick white tongues have been spread just a little
so that it is plain for all to see that the type has been spaced too much and
the book made thicker and heavier than it might have been, and certainly more
than what the book – as it appears to me – has necessarily warranted. All the
new novels that are published these days are thicker and heavier that the
novels themselves would usually warrant. Each of them is thicker and heavier,
by virtue of the fact that the pages are thicker than they should have been and
the type spaced further apart than it should have been and the cover made
thicker than it should have been in the mistaken belief that the worth of a
novel is always only equivalent to its thickness and weight and that the more
of it you have when you buy it, the more likely you have bought something
worthwhile or at least worth the excessive thickness and heaviness that the
publisher has made of it.

Our writer is actually
addressing herself throughout, not you the reader, as she loops back and forth
from the funeral, the wake, her dinner with Raf, her walk to the café, you
become more and more engrossed in this part memoir (is it? The character is Jen
Craig – previously known as Jenny Craig before a well-known dieting company
ruined her life). There is even a dig at the title of the book itself (as we
know it also happens to be the title of the mysterious manuscript) it is
described as being “rich and suggestive” even though it is simply “the wording
of a roadsign that anybody in Sydney would recognize”.

A very clever novel
that visits modern media, modern issues, and the everyday mundane, it is also a
musing on the art of writing and the pleasure of writing;

This was the way to write, I could see: just cutting to the quick. Sarah’s
manuscript was nothing at all – nothing, yes nothing at all, I could have told
Raf – but the quick of it was visible everywhere on its pages. There was
nothing but quick in the manuscript: quick and quick and quick. This was how I
began to write yesterday. And I don’t remember what I wrote, but I do remember
the quick.

A book that Debra
Adelaide (also longlisted for the Stella Prize for her book “The Women’s Pages”)
describes on the back cover “Jen Craig has the astonishing ability to make us
believe she has held every word of the story in her head, then delivered it
onto the page in a seamless whole.”

A refreshing change
from the standard Australian fiction I have become used to, a unique voice, a
style you don’t see too often in this country and a thoroughly enjoyable work.
Having said that, it would be some bold judges to award the Prize to this book….